1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to a technique and translator for translating attribute-data carried in various CMIP PDUs into user-designed data structures. Typically one data structure is used to represent the attribute-data of an instance of a Managed Object class defined using GDMO specifications. The ability to store data in user-designed structures, as opposed to some mechanically generated structures is useful for a variety of purposes (simpler data representation, compact storage, easier integration with other applications, etc.) in implementing Telecommunications Management Network (TMN) applications.
2. Background of the Invention
The GDMO information modeling and the CMIP protocol provide a very powerful and generic framework for implementing OSI systems management. However, the power and generality of this framework has a high cost in terms of the complexity involved in the implementation of Systems Management applications based on the CMIP protocol.
There are at least four methods that may be of some use in implementing CMIP protocol based management applications.
Anezaki describes a method in U.S. Pat. No. 4,994,948 for automatically generating C structures by parsing ASN.1 definitions. This method does not provide any mechanism for the users to customize the C structures, and also does not have any special support for the semantics of CMIP PDUs and GDMO constructs.
Bapat describes a translator in U.S. Pat. No. 5,295,256 for translating objects defined using ASN.1 and GDMO constructs into a relational database schema for persistent storage. This method also performs mechanical translations, without allowing users to customize the data representation. This method also does not have any special support for the translation of CMIP PDUs to/from target data representation.
X/Open CAE Specification C502 describes a method for translating objects defined using ASN.1 and GDMO constructs into C data structures; these C structures are mechanically generated, without allowing the user to define the target data structures.
X/Open CAE Specification C306 defines an Application Programming Interface for accessing the CMIP PDU data that is translated according to mechanical mapping schemes described in X/Open CAE Specification C502. This method also does not provide any direct support for users to define the target data structures for representing the Managed Object data and performing automatic translations between CMIP PDUs and the user data structures. With this method, such translations should be performed completely by user-written code.
All of the above approaches retain the complexity of data representation, and leave it to the users to implement the mapping between the attribute data in CMIP PDUs to application-specific data structures. However, because of the need to handle a large number of Managed Object (MO) classes, attributes, ASN.1 types and different types of CMIP PDUs, it becomes a tedious and error-prone process to implement translations for all resulting permutations and combinations. Consequently, there is a need for a simple, reliable method to make these translations.